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The Essay Podcast

The Essay

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Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week - insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.

The Essay: Meanings of Mountains

The Essay: Meanings of Mountains: Episode 5: Peru

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Meanings of Mountains

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Episode 5: Peru

Peru

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Javier Lizarzaburu on the Inca shrine of Pariacaca and what the mountain means today.

Javier Lizarzaburu explores how Pariacaca, home of an Inca oracle and once site of a shrine and ritual, lives on, and what the mountain means to Peruvians now.

The Meanings of Mountains series which this week, following the sun, has reflected the relationships of peoples from Japan, China, Slovenia and Scotland with their mountains now concludes in Peru. Javier Lizarzaburu, a journalist living in Lima, considers how the shrine at Pariacaca, the mountain home of an important Inca oracle, was suppressed by Jesuits 400 years ago, with the destruction of thousands of images and the exile of its priests. 
He considers how the mountain, which has two peaks, embodied the duality of the Andean world view, and its centrality to the Inca creation story. He shows how this story did not disappear but absorbed the new religion, and how, although suppressed, the cult of Pariacaca survives. Javier recalls a friend whose grandmother told him that, rather than the old man sitting in the room, the mountain outside was really his grandfather. Peruvians revere mountains, yet have close, familial relationships with them, and Pariacaca is a mountain with many meanings. 

Producer: Julian May.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Series about relationships that different peoples of the world have with their mountains

Series of essays that, following the sun's path from east to west travels from Japan to Peru, reveal the relationships that different peoples have with their mountains

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